Another color I have always really liked is OPI’s Chopsticking to my Story from their spring 2010 Hong Kong collection. It’s a bold rusty orange that treads the line between being richly saturated and somehow subdued enough to be warm and sophisticated and not overly vivid like orange has a tendency to be. I feel a broad spectrum of colors from this shade and felt as if it is able to leak rusty brown that fades into yellow hues onto the paper.

In the process of trying to come with some new ideas for my site header, I was experimenting with the idea of combining my love of nail lacquer and watercolor. I was considering using the polish itself to paint with and combine the viscous shiny lacquer with the thin translucencies of watercolor, but I ended up simply being inspired by the color of the polish itself and wanted to express the color through a mix of watercolor drips.

This left me with a combination of polish swatches and paint to share with you. I selected a few of my more favorite cream finishes from my collection that I thought went well together.

First is Barielle’s Aura Angora from their 2010 fall The Style in Argyle collection. It’s a golden mustard with hints of burnt rusty brown to it. It’s one of those colors I don’t think is explored enough in the nail polish world. I find a great brown-toned muted yellow like this can be very chic while being subdued and neutral. I’d happily pair this color with many other colors which is why I chose it for this exercise.

It’s a shame that my fingers are showing up so pink as this color works well with my light olive coloring, but I think I was pressing my finger too hard against the paper to take a picture. Oops. Also, this polish is fully glossy despite the illusion of a matte tip. That’s just an interesting side effect of reflecting the very textured matte paper.

An artform I’ve greatly enjoyed experimenting with lately is vector drawing. There’s something I really enjoy about the tedious process of organizing and separating an image into colors. It really forces you to make decisions since the style I’ve been using allows each section to be only one color, so you have to create the illusion of blending, shading, and highlighting with single color selections.

My most recent illustration was my betta fish, of course. His name is BluBo which was an unintentional, silly riff on the former betta fish named BoBo that ended up sticking. It’s been interesting watching his colors change as he has aged. He was once a very vivid and iridescent teal green with some slight red accents, but he’s become deeper blue and the red is only visible in certain lights. Even still, depending on the lighting his former green-tinged iridescence can still be perceived.

I poured a bunch of work into this illustration in a short amount of time because I wanted it to be incorporated into a valentine’s day card. I’m still pleased with the way it came out, and I hope to work with a more dynamically colored image of him next time to keep studying his range of colors.